More winning. Congrats to @nomascus.bsky.social @gallinaciega.bsky.social @raccoonologist.bsky.social and others in our team for 'Top viewed article' at The Anatomical Record, the article concerned being our review of Mesozoic dinosaur cognition. Fascinating and contentious topic. #FossilFriday

Very happy to announce that our project "ReVol" has been selected for funding through the CNRS Joint PhD Programme international.cnrs.fr/actualite/re...

RULE NO 1. never trust an unlabelled unsourced graph. I have tracked this graph's source down: bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

One of the most thoughtful, carefully-phrased, pieces I have read on the topic: lots of good progress in recent years showing how we may have under-appreciated the structural complexity of non-human communicative signals 🧪 By @tozbu.bsky.social @taichimpproject.bsky.social & R. Wittig

New preprint, building on the thesis of my former undergrad @cstreitferdt.bsky.social: doi.org/10.64898/202... We present evidence that conjunctival pigmentation (peripheral to the iris) in terrestrial mammals is importantly driven by demands of UV protection. Quick thread 🧵1/5.

Another day, another Springer journal, another paper which uncritically uses Lynn's "national IQ" data. Apparently journals with impact factors of 27.1 don't have better quality control than those with IFs a fraction of the size... www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Everyone should pay civilization fees (taxes) because we all benefit from society, though people who are able to extract the most out of society should pay the highest civilization fees!

The facts: -Bezos paid $0 fed'l income tax in 2007 -He paid $0 in '11 -Btn '14-19, his wealth grew by $99 BILLION and he paid $973 million in taxes. Sounds like a lot but it's 0.98% of his wealth growth (which is his true income). www.propublica.org/article/the-...

Counterpoint: Yes they are, and that is good

Just imagine the level of criminality that compels a President who was already personally granted full immunity by Supreme Court for anything related to 'official acts' to think that's not enough, he must *also* have his DOJ release all civil claims against him, two of his kids, and his company.

“.. What we are talking about is nothing short of the sitting president of the United States looting from the Treasury for his own gain,” she said. @financialtimes.com www.ft.com/content/5733...

Again, this Trump IRS thing is not a “settlement” or a “deal” or something with any legal basis at all. It’s pure corruption; colluding with his Acting AG to loot the Treasury; pay off his mob; and preemptively immunize himself and his heirs against investigation for fraud.

With @remyfurrer.bsky.social, a new piece in Nature Human Behavior. The standard description of a polygenic score as a "genetic predisposition" essentializes a statistical construct. It's not language policing: PGS are a new kind of entity; now is the time to think carefully about what they are.

“Instead of student loan forgiveness we’re doing a coup forgiveness program”

The Trump administration will not rest until every elite institution has purged itself of black people. ballsandstrikes.org/law-politics...

We are a half century into assuming uncontrollable labor conditions can proxy education quality, which coincidentally absolves business leaders of any responsibility for the market. I will never understand why people blame higher ed for “not teaching relevant skills” when this is the reality.

Calling all paleoanthropologists! I'm back freelancing and looking for stories to pitch. New paper dropping? Cool find you want the world to know about? Reach out! 🧪🏺✍️

The Christian nationalist penchant for making fables—for hatching just-so stories, and propagating them into benumbed acceptance—goes a distance toward explaining that community’s embrace of an unrepentant liar like Trump as its champion.

It's good they're quoting scholars here to dismiss the fiction that America was founded as a Christian nation, but you can just read the Constitution yourself. There are only three references to religion in it, all meant to keep it out of government, to avoid conflicts that had rocked Europe.

Stop calling the leisured provincial gentry "working class"

Check out the brain endocast of Homo naledi with these landmark data and R code #FossilFriday lawnchairanthropology.com/2026/05/15/p...

this truly is the thing that makes the united states exceptional, and right wingers hate it so much they want to destroy it

Cool, so NSF is now going to be used to essentially launder money to tech bros because universities are just too cumbersome and disciplinary oversight and regulations and accountability are all just too stifling for innovation. $1.5B for “X-Labs.”

Every now and again this old dinosaur+Dark Crystal crossover post picks up random traffic for reasons unknown to me (this is one of those times) lawnchairanthropology.com/2015/05/03/y...

Terrific resource in @nature.com for anyone interested in human brain development: White matter micro- and macrostructure brain charts for the human lifespan 🧪🧠📈 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

How did farming reach the Southern Andes? Through migration or cultural transmission? Our new paper in @nature.com combines ancient DNA, isotopes, archaeology & paleoclimate to reconstruct 2,000+ years of history in Uspallata, Mendoza. www.nature.com/articles/s41... A Thread🧵 (1/25+)

I’m tired of the dishonesty of this entire debate. The folks calling for “perspectives different from their own“ are shutting down Women’s and African American studies because they hate differing opinions. Marginalized folks had a small foothold, and powerful people decided to push them out.

Proteins recovered from 400,000-year-old fossils show humans living today may have inherited genes from Homo erectus: "There’s far greater complexity in terms of hominins across Eurasia than previously recognized," says @york.ac.uk geochemist Kirsty Penkman. @science.org

Scientists have identified ancient proteins from Homo erectus, marking the first time genetic info has been extracted from the species. But the results raise the question -- Do we even know what Homo erectus is? 🧪🏺

interesting study! though sadly after the root canal the neandertal's dental insurance rejected the claim and they had to pay the whole thing out of pocket

Modular genetic architecture underlies human hand and foot evolution | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Most medium-sized English cities are going to be left devastated by the HE crisis if government doesn’t do something soon.

I'm hiring a postdoc to lead sedimentary aDNA reconstructions of alpine plant biodiversity as part of a broader project exploring the mechanisms of alpine plant resilience. Come join a collaborative team working in beautiful places! Bonus: postdocs at UMaine are unionized!

Our HERI’s Rivoningo Khosa revisits the landscapes around the #TaungChild fossil. Her study shows southern Africa was more dynamic and less dry than previously thought, using new quantitative methods to create richer models of landscape evolution. Read the paper: sajs.co.za/article/view...

New paper out in @pnas.org led by Marine Cazenave shows different locomotor repertoires in Swartkrans Paranthropus and Sterkfontein Australopithecus! www.mpg.de/26471037/swa...

Excited about our new paper led by postdoc Jacob Feder, which examines social organization variation of baboons and their relatives. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Jacob's website here: jacobfeder.weebly.com UMass news release here: www.umass.edu/news/article...

“What Mamdani just did to me, and more broadly is doing to the city of New York, is triggering of the trauma I went through in Chicago." - Ken Griffin, worth $50.3 billion, triggered

Smithsonian Fish Curator position announcement! Note the application dates of May 12 – June 2, 2026. Should be posted here tomorrow: trustcareers.si.edu#js-careers-j...

Great resource – 3D atlas of white matter pathways in the chimpanzee brain (by Cornelius Eichner & colleagues 2024 www.nature.com/articles/s41...)

Worth noting that the bad data was provided to SCOTUS in a DOJ brief, submitted by DOJ lawyers.

✨The 2026:1 PaleoAnthropology issue is now published, with nine original research articles, a book review and the abstracts of the Paleoanthropology Society 2026 meeting! ✨ See link below, all content is #openaccess

Discourse about finding "the Rogan of the Left" or "the liberal answer to Fox News" rarely accounts for the reality that the entire conservative media universe is the enormously unprofitable vanity project of a few rich sociopaths. It "succeeds" because they don't care how much it costs.

I am hiring a PhD student to join our group in Lund, Sweden working on an ERC-funded project to untangle color and polarization vision in some amazing crustaceans – minute water fleas and pugnacious mantis shrimp! Please forward this to promising students. Apply here: lu.varbi.com/en/what:job/...

Fresh ink for #FossilFriday: Tylosaurus, the official state marine fossil of Kansas where I was born. What now is mostly prairie was a terrifying sea during the Cretaceous

uh huh. the Trumpists (and their allies in both the tech-finance world and hard-right political movements internationally) would rather be on the tippy-top of a mountain of garbage, shit and skulls than accountable to other people in a healthy, prosperous multiracial democracy

To sum up: the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act were passed to remedy a century of attempts to disenfranchise and unperson African-Americans by any possible, often through voting-related tricks and tests and barriers. They worked -- for a while. But then..../1

It's amazing how quickly White politicians in the South rushed to PROVE exactly why we needed the Voting Rights Act!

Nice recent article in Nature about sediment DNA and its impacts on human evolution and archaeology, featuring two of our great colleagues here in Vienna, Pere Gelabert and Ben Vernot @heasvienna.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/d41...